At the same time however, we learn that several of the team’s top computer vision experts have left the company over the past few weeks.

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In May 2015, Tesla hired Berta Rodriguez-Hervas, a research scientist from The University of Texas at El Paso and working at Mercedes’ R&D center, to be among the first computer vision experts working on Autopilot.

She was working under Tesla’s head of computer vision, David Nistér, who joined the automaker just a month prior.

But she is not the only computer vision expert on Tesla’s team to leave over the past few weeks.

Electrek has learned that Minwoo Park, the lead of the Visual Perception team in Autopilot and one of the first computer vision engineers at Tesla, and Yekeun Jeong, the head of the Geometric Vision team at Autopilot and one of the former lead scientists on Microsoft’s Hololens, both left this month.

It comes just as Tesla is currently in the process of improving its computer vision system for Autopilot in order to transition vehicles with second generation hardware to the new more advanced ‘Enhanced Autopilot’.

Nonetheless, the 3 lead engineers in computer vision represent a significant loss of talent that Karpathy will now likely have to replace.

Self-driving technology is currently creating an incredibly high demand for engineers with an expertise in computer vision – making Tesla’s Autopilot engineers high value targets for recruiters since they are among a rare breed of engineers in the field who are actually delivering products in the space that’s being used by customers outside of test fleets.

Karpathy has a similarly high-profile, especially in the artificial neural network community, and could also help Tesla attract new talent in field. He used to teach a computer vision class at Stanford, which could help him target young new engineers in the field.